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Page 42
The story also appeals to the child's imagination, which is so ready for
use and so vivid, and which it is so necessary to employ upon good
material in order to safeguard its possessor from using it in harmful
ways. Long before the child has come to the age of understanding
reasoned truth, therefore, he may well have implanted in his mind many
of the deepest and most beautiful religious truths which will ever come
to him.
The Old Testament rich in story material.--The wonderful religious and
ethical teachings of the Old Testament belong to a child-nation, and
were written by men who were in freshness of heart and in
picturesqueness and simplicity of thought essentially child-men; hence
these teachings are in large part written in the form of story, of
legend, of allegory, of myth, of vivid picture and of unrimed poetry. It
is this quality which makes the material so suitable to the child. The
deeper meanings of the story do not have to be explained, even to the
young child; he grasps them, not all at once, but slowly and surely as
the story is told and retold to him. If the story is properly told, the
child does not have to be taught that the Bible myth or legend _is_ myth
or legend; he accepts it as such, not troubling to analyze or explain,
but unconsciously appropriating such inner meaning as his experience
makes possible, and building the lesson into the structure of his
growing nature.
If full advantage is taken of the story as a means of religious
teaching, the grounding of the child in the fundamental concepts and
attitudes of religion can be accomplished with certainty and
effectiveness almost before the age for really formal instruction has
come.
The ethical quality alone not enough in stories.--Many stories of
highest religious value are available from other sources than the Bible,
yet no other stories can ever wholly take the place of the Bible
stories. For the Bible stories possess one essential quality lacking in
stories from other sources; the Bible stories _are saturated with God_.
And this is an element wholly vital to the child's instruction in
religion.
We cannot teach the child religion on the basis of ethics alone,
necessary as morality is to life. We cannot help the child to spiritual
growth and the consciousness of God in his life without having the
matter we teach him permeated and made alive with the spirit and
presence of God in it. Nor is there the least difficulty for the child
to understand God in the stories. The child, like the Hebrews
themselves, does not feel any necessity of explaining or accounting for
God, but readily and naturally accepts him and the part he plays in our
affairs as a matter of course.
Stories from other than Bible sources.--But once a sufficient
proportion of Bible stories is provided for, stories should be freely
drawn from other fields. An abundance of rich material possessing true
religious worth can be found in the myths, legends, folk lore, and
heroic tales of many literatures. These are a treasure house with which
every teacher of children should be familiar; nor is the task a
burdensome one, for much of this material holds a value and charm even
for the older ones of us.
Later writers have enriched the fund of material available for children
by treating many of the aspects of nature in story form, thereby opening
up to the mind and heart of the child something of the meaning and
beauty of the physical world, and showing God as the giver of many good
gifts in this realm of our lives. There are also available the stories
of history, and of the real men and women whose lives have blessed our
own or other times, and whose deeds and achievements will appeal to the
imagination and stir the ideals of youth.
The teacher as a story teller.--The successful teacher of religion
must therefore possess the art which will enable him to use the story as
one of the chief forms of material in his instruction. He must _know_
the stories. He must be able to tell them interestingly. The story loses
half of its effectiveness if it must be _read_ to the child, but it may
lose in similar proportion if it is haltingly or ineffectively told. It
is not necessary, at least for the younger children, to use a large
number of stories. In fact, there is positive disadvantage in attempting
to employ so many stories that the child does not become wholly familiar
with each separate one. Children do not tire of the stories they like;
indeed, their love for a story increases as they come to know it well,
and they will demand to have the same story told over and over in
preference to a new one.
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